U.S. can't handle its scandal: 2013 mass surveillance leaks

In June, U.S. former government contractor Edward Snowden blew the lid on one of the world's biggest secrets in living history: the U.S. government was engaged in a massive global dragnet surveillance operation.

The leaks sparked mass debate around the world between national security priorities and citizen civil liberties. It was a massive punch in the face for the White House, which had spent decades keeping the spying programs under wraps.

Snowden was charged with espionage, but ultimately fled to Russia under the former-Communist country's protection, and out of the U.S.' reach. But additional leaks implicated other nations, including those of the "Five Eyes" — the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It was a government stuff-up on epic proportions.

It was without doubt the epic fail of the year — allowing Snowden to walk away with tens of thousands of documents that detail in near-exact detail how the U.S. and other countries spy on each other (and themselves).

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Amid NSA scandal, the collapse of journalism

The U.S. government leaks were bad enough, but the early reporting on the emerging NSA scandal was just as dire.

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The U.S. government mass surveillance scandal may be the biggest ongoing story of the year. In this updating timeline, you can explore the full scope of the Edward Snowden leaks, which have implicated the world's most powerful nations in the worldwide spying operation.

With the release of the first slides on PRISM, the two newspaper giants The Guardian and The Washington Post were behind the breaking stories. But The Post, which was playing catch-up with its British journalistic counterparts, reported something that was not strictly true — even if it's what the leaked documents said or even alluded to.

Despite being the one and only source on the matter, the newspapers failed to "vet" him properly.

Claiming that the NSA had "direct access" to servers of Silicon Valley giants led The Post to eventually withdraw the vast majority of its story without explaining exactly what or why. It was a mess that led to harsh critique of the publication.

The Post went on to accurately report further leaks supplied by the former U.S. government contractor.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: Ed Bott/ZDNet

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Java zero-day exploit led to spate of Silicon Valley hacking

While the NSA was not able (that we know of... yet) to gain "direct access" to Silicon Valley servers — with the exception of Google and Yahoo, hackers successfully infiltrated the internal networks of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter.

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Reports suggest that both Facebook and Apple employees — and likely others, including Twitter — visited an infected website laden with malware, which exploited a vulnerability in Java. Now that the cause has been identified, here's what you can do.

The story broke at the start of the year in a tale of two parts. Hackers had rigged a popular iPhone development site with malware. When developers at the named companies accessed the site from a work machine, an unpatched Java zero-day exploit allowed attackers into their internal networks.

While no company data was taken, with Microsoft et al admitting that only a few machines were affected, it came at a time where many companies were on their guard from a recent spate of China and Syria-based hackers.

Even the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security warned users to disable or uninstall Java as a result of the flaw, which ultimately went on to affect hundreds of millions of Windows, Mac, and Linux machines — including mobile devices, embedded systems, Web applications, and servers.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: ZDNet/Internet Archive

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Controversial cyber-security data sharing law passes the U.S. House

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, commonly referred to as CISPA, was a controversial security bill that eventually passed the U.S. Senate, despite being scrapped more than a year earlier.

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The Obama administration has issued another stark warning to the US House currently preparing to vote on a regurgitated cybersecurity Bill. If it passes the president's desk, he's not going to sign it.

Many considered the bill to be a major threat to Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and seizures. It would have allowed private sector firms to search personal and sensitive user data of ordinary U.S. residents to identify "threat information," which can then be shared with other opt-in firms and the U.S. government without the need for a court-ordered warrant.

Despite the uproar and the concern by many, the fact that senators still passed the bill — even if it failed in the House — represented a disaster for citizen representation, as hundreds of thousands protested the bill.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: CNET

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Anonymous rages on: Hacks prevail, leaks continue

If you thought hacktivist group Anonymous had been relatively quiet this year, think again.

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Illegal goods trading platform, Sheep Marketplace, shuts down with a Bitcoin haul estimated to be as large as US$100 million. It is unclear if hackers or the site owner absconded with the money, but signs point to a scam.

In January, the hacking group attacked the U.S. Sentencing Commission in an operation dubbed "Operation Last Resort." This led to the distribution of government files in apparent retaliation of hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide after facing a lengthy jail sentence many considered disproportionally large.

Later in the year, the loose-knit collective went on to attack networks that led to the publication of more than 4,000 separate bits of login information, credentials, IP addresses, and contact information of American bank executives.

It was a public relations nightmare for the U.S. government, which had already faced heavy criticism for its handling of the Swartz case. It was a show of force that led the government and others to realize the hacking collective may have been quiet during the year, but they haven't gone away — while at the same time pushing for changes to the law that would ultimately legally avenge the death of Swartz in a namesake law.

But it caused enough of a stir at first to deter millions from upgrading immediately.

Many didn't upgrade immediately because it broke existing enterprise services. Some were warned off because the upgrade would cause device slow-downs. And, other bugs made the software near impossible to use for some. There were dozens of new features added in the update that saw a high level of uptake, but hardly rocket to the extent Apple wanted.

Now more than three months later, three-quarters of all devices are running iOS 7, a slower pace than earlier releases.

Some of the major issues boiled down to security. There was a bug seemingly every minute, and a security flaw with almost every minor update.

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The world's largest social network, with more than one billion users worldwide, collected information on people who weren't even signed up to the social network. This "bug" spanned a year beginning in 2012 and affected more than six million users. The data related to people who had expressly not given their permission for Facebook to collect their data, including email addresses and phone numbers. For those who protect their data, it was a privacy flop of epic proportions.

Also, the company found itself in hot water after it decided to first ban and then permit videos of people being decapitated. Either way, Facebook couldn't escape controversy. In any case, Facebook's decision was going to royally screw up at least someone's day.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: James Martin/CNET

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

FBI inadvertently brings file-sharing battle to worldwide attention

If you're going to bring someone down, try to do it quietly. In the FBI's case, the federal agency failed miserably when it tried to extradite alleged pirate king Kim Dotcom to the U.S.

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The trouble is the FBI picked the wrong guy to start a war with. Despite throwing the full weight of the New Zealand police to launch a look-a-like anti-terrorist operation against for charges of "racketeering, money laundering, and copyright theft," he ultimately evaded U.S. authorities.

Dotcom dusted himself off and relaunched his newly branded file service startup. As for the New Zealand authorities, they were slapped for "illegal spying" which forced the country's prime minister to publicly apologize.

It was criticized for its game-changing user interface. It was difficult to use for some who had been used to the typical 'Windows' experience for many years prior.

And for those using desktops and notebooks without touch screens — a large majority of the overall user base — it was just too much for some to relearn. The fact that Microsoft killed the Start menu also killed the company's hope of millions of people upgrading.

Ultimately it led the software giant down a course of eating humble pie, resulting in Windows 8.1, a software update that attempted to appease (and entice) customers who were thrown off by the first round of changes. The Start menu was brought back — in a sense — and booting directly to desktop may have had some positive impact on less-than-pleased customers.

Meanwhile, a number of other wearable devices hit the market later on after further development in efforts to learn from Samsung's mistakes.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: CNET

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Yahoo's string of fluff-ups month-on-month

Yahoo had a tough year. It spent most of its time cleaning up the horrendous mess it created by changing something, redesigning something, or upgrading a product. It left end users angry, and even its own staff stressed out.

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It was five years ago this month that Microsoft officially dropped its plan to acquire Yahoo for $47.5 billion. In hindsight, losing that battle was the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft.

The company then gave itself a makeover with a new redesigned logo. Not one, but 30 over the course of as many days. Eventually it settled on just one, spreading the news out for longer than it should've done in efforts to milk the media's attention.

But what really angered a lot of people, including Yahoo staff who reportedly don't even eat their own "dogfood," was the redesigned Yahoo Mail, which crumbled after it first relaunched.

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The company cut 4,500 staff amid serious concerns about the company's balance sheet. BlackBerry was already by this point looking for a bank or investment firm to bail out the company, which ultimately failed.

BlackBerry subsequently waved goodbye to its chief executive Thorsten Heins, who failed to turn the company around following the rise of competing smartphones.

Former Sybase boss John Chen took the lead and promised to turn the company around. But the proof will be in the pudding. Chen said he will "rebuild" the company and keep the smartphone-making unit, but many enterprise customers are looking

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: BlackBerry

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Obamacare passes, but Healthcare.gov falls flat on its face

Yes, this may be buried way down the list but it was arguably the biggest public-raging stuff-up of the year. It even had the President knocking it from above.

The Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," was just one part of the plan to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system. The problems landed with the website, which on launch day failed to work.

It was an absolute mess: data wasn't going to the right places, users couldn't sign up for anything, and the website would crash every few seconds making it impossible to do anything.

The White House brought in the big guns in form of Silicon Valley to help fix the failed website. Eventually the hosting was scrapped and replaced by HP, which actually knows what it's doing when it comes to these things.

It took two whole months to realize the scope of the issues, and extended the deadline for sign-ups into 2014 to appease disgruntled Americans.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: CBS/ZDNet

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Google squares up with Europe over antitrust charges

Google dropped the ball this year when it was forced to renegotiate (at least on two occasions) its antitrust settlement with the European Union, after the executive body threw allegations of anticompetitive behavior at the search giant.

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It was described as one of the most advanced biometric scanners developed by a company to date. It didn't last long though.

Within just a few days, a bounty was put on the technology's head to see if hackers could bypass the device's security. Lo and behold, the Cupertino, Calif.-based technology giant ended up with egg on its face after it was bypassed with a fake finger.

Apple stayed mum on the matter and didn't acknowledge the hack. It was nice while it lasted — all of about a week.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: CNET

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Tesla rips New York Times over dubious review

Up and coming technology star Tesla suffered serious burns from a journalism fire set by The New York Times, which claimed in a review of its Tesla Model S that the electric car couldn't keep a charge and ran out of juice long before the reviewer reached their intended destination.

Musk accused the reviewer of failing to charge the car fully before his intended roadtrip — all revealed by the car's logs, which Musk later published — leading to claims of bias and suggestions that the reviewer "faked" the test.

In the end, though Tesla suffered a hit at first, it was the New York-based newspaper that came away far more bruised.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: CNET

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Adobe security breach affects tens of millions, fallout extensive

In what was probably the worst hack of the year (perhaps the decade, shy of Sony PlayStation's Network hacking catastrophe).

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Adobe suffered a massive data breach in October that resulted in the theft of up to 38 million users.

Many were more angered by the fact Adobe didn't start emailing people affected by the hack until close to a month after the news first came to light.

Some of the passwords were simply and easy to crack, in spite of Adobe's encryption methods.

As a result, other companies — like Facebook and Amazon — took charge of its own user base and warned those who might have used the same Adobe password on the social network to change their passwords too.

Published: December 7, 2013 -- 05:00 GMT (21:00 PST)

Photo by: ZDNet

Caption by: Zack Whittaker

Google Reader shuts down; users go nuts

Life is full of those hacks that make the day-to-day just that much easier. The online world isn't so different.

Because so many applications and services rely on Google Reader, it led to many popular services shutting down, but also many springing up to replace the news aggregator. Google said it was closing the service in order to put energy "into fewer projects," but many loyal users weren't happy — in total, millions of them.

The bright side is that it gave other companies a way to fill the void. Feedly, a replacement Google Reader service, drummed up half-a-million new users in just two days, and three million in the following two weeks.

But it caused enough of a stir at first to deter millions from upgrading immediately.

Many didn't upgrade immediately because it broke existing enterprise services. Some were warned off because the upgrade would cause device slow-downs. And, other bugs made the software near impossible to use for some. There were dozens of new features added in the update that saw a high level of uptake, but hardly rocket to the extent Apple wanted.

Now more than three months later, three-quarters of all devices are running iOS 7, a slower pace than earlier releases.

Some of the major issues boiled down to security. There was a bug seemingly every minute, and a security flaw with almost every minor update.